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Most importantly- scroll to the bottom and leave a comment explaining your specific use-case scenario. It needn't be detailed like mine here. Just a few sentances will suffice to show your support and need for this feature. Thanks!!

Overview

I want to create notifications which look like Outlook emails but which also include rich formatting for links and images. My request is not unique. At the bottom of this feature request, you'll see the other 6 posts asking for a similar feature.

Example Screenshots

Here are a few screenshots showing the same exact conversation replicated a few different ways. Hopefully these screenshots will show the desired result and also how each of the current options falls short.

Outlook native email conversation.

The screenshot below doesn't use Zendesk at all. This is how we want our Zendesk conversations to look-- or at least as close to this as possible. The thing lacking in this example is obviously that it's not routed through Zendesk and hence not trackable as a ticket.

Using the placeholder {{ticket.comments_formatted}}

The two screenshots below show this same conversation using Zendesk's placeholder {{ticket.comments_formatted}} with and without picture downloading. Both of these screenshots show how the formatting doesn't match that of native email communication.

Using the placeholder {{comment.value}}

The final screenshot shows the same conversation using Zendesk's placeholder {{comment.value}} and others. It also utilizes liquid markup.

My attempt

For now, I have opted to go with the last option above. It seems to get us about 90% of what we want using the code below. The long challenge seems to be that the placeholder {{comment.value}} strips out links and inline images which we insert via the Answer Suggestions app and the Rich Content editor, respectively.

Links which are spelled out entirely (starting with http) work fine because most email readers will convert those hyperlink automatically. The problem we are seeing, though, is that when we use the Answer Suggestions app to insert more friendly looking text linked to an article in our Help Center, those kind of links are not showing up for the recipient as links, only plain text.

Images which are attached or placed inline using the new Rich Content editor (which is awesome by the way, everyone should take a look at it) are replaced with URL links to those images. The links are functional but this is still less than ideal since the recipient has to click a link, or possibly multiple links, to get to the images an agent might be sending to show then how to solve their issue.

My request to Zendesk

I’m not the only one asking for this or something very similar. Please take a look at the requests below. I mention them here to show the existing support for this feature.

I also want to acknowledge that it seems a contradiction of terms to want a formatted version of an “unformatted” email template. I think what most of us are going for is a more beautiful design without all of the embellishments built into the Zendesk formatted comments placeholder {{ticket.comments_formatted}}.

23 Comments

We're releasing the ability to have placeholders and liquid that allow you to set up email replies without the Zendesk styling and that finally render your HTML. Thanks you for your detailed feedback and rallying other members on the community.

We were previously using custom formatting with liquid to be able to remove some repeated legalese at the bottom of certain emails. This worked really well but we had to sacrifice the use of HTML formatting in emails to accomplish it. I almost started work on a custom markdown interpreter built with liquid but eventually gave up on it due to complexity.

We have since switched to just using the standard formatted comments array because the recent updates to html emails and wysiswyg editing have made those features more valuable to us than the annoyance of the legalese.

Would love to have this feature as well!

Ps, sorry I can't provide a screenshot of the legal text without approval but trust me, it's long, and it has no business being in ticket emails.

@AndrewJ - Thanks for the reply. I appreciate your input as always. I'm trying to have Zendesk notifications (emails) look more similar to Outlook emails.

What do your mean by "preferred text format". Most users will never mess with the display settings in Outlook itself so I'm not concerned with that.

As for turning on photos in emails from Zendesk-- that's a whole other battle I think I may never win with our Exchange admins. I'd love to know if anyone has had any success whitelisting Zendesk.com for images embedded in emails but I have been told it is impossible.

The difference between v1b and Outlook can be seen visually in the comparison below. First there's the big white space at the top of the email. I turned the mail delimiter white but have yet to find a way to reduce the top padding. Then the color of the text in the body-- Outlook shows the most recent message in blue text to set it apart from the other previous emails which are shown in black text. Then there's the topmost horizontal line that exists in the v1b version (it's hard to see in the small images here). It's strange to have a line above the first part of an email message. I think I remember that the only way to make that go away was to remove all horizontal lines between subsequent messages by formatting it white (which we do want since Outlook has grey lines between messages). Lastly, there's stuff not in the screenshot here. In Outlook, you can see who was CCd on the current and previous emails.

@Andrew Mills - There is always going to be a risk of people commenting on lower part of emails... after all, you can't entirely eliminate user error. 99% of the time people have half a brain to simply click "reply" and type in the head of a new email.

In that rare case when someone types "Please see my responses below" and typed below the line, you can always open up the original HTML email to see what was typed.

Depending on how people are using Zendesk, it's important sometimes to make it look like they are receiving a regular email.

Even right now we are evaluating whether to move forward with Zendesk based on this one feature "Make emails look like emails, not tickets".

What we want to achieve:

Removal of the blank white space, persons name and all the other formatting before the last response.

Can't use CSS to change formatting all the time:

This is half true, but it also depends on the email client. Even using the right CSS to manipulate the current formatted elements will produce funky and different results depending on the email client which the email is being opened on.

How are we doing this right now:

Like what Justin said above, we are using unformatted comments to make the email look like a real email - downside is you can't have any HTML formatting in that last comment.

Hope this helps in pushing the feature forward!!! Seems there is a growing requirement to have more control over the email templates.

This is a big one for us as well. We want the "unformatted" look of email as well, but still support for embedded images, rich text (eg bold, italics, etc) without the impersonal feeling of the ticket.last_comment_formatted default formatting.

If we could have a comment.value that processes the markdown formatting instead of just exposing it as plain text, that would be ideal.

That worked perfectly for what I was trying to accomplish except for it stripped my signature. Could you direct me to which part of the code I can add or remove to bring my agent signature back in? Thank you!

I also got the unformatted template to work, thank you. The only issue I'm seeing now is that it still does not feel like an email conversation with the user. Replies from the ZenDesk agent are all present (i.e. public comment history) in every email that is sent to the user. It would be nice if only the most recent comment was sent since these days, most email clients retain a history of all comments, it seems a little redundant to send old comments in every new email. Any suggestions?

I am so sorry for not responding earlier, I had overlooked your message. That is very well possible if you use a different placeholder in your trigger. Just use `ticket.latest_public_comment_formatted` or `ticket.latest_comment_formatted`.

@Torri

Your agent signature is not located in this code. You might want to double check your Settings > Agent to see if there is anything there.

We want to have the formatting/markdown features and rich content for our agents' emails, but we don't want all that spacing and lines and headers that come default with the preformatted latest_public_comment_formatted.

the new placeholder {{comment.value_rich}} does not work for us. We have tested it and it generates blank space in our outgoing e-mails.

We have used {{comment.value}} until now. We have changed this placeholder in our triggers to {{comment.value_rich}} and changed the comment editor from Markdown to Rich-Editor. Additionally we have activated Rich-Content in e-mails.

But after changing the placeholders, we did not see the formatted ticket comments in our outgoing e-mails. The placeholder generates just blank space.

But we have another bug with a placeholder in our macros now. We are using a placeholder for a custom User drop-down field (gender).

So in our macros we use the following placeholder: {{ticket.requester.custom_fields.<gender>.title}}

After changing to the rich-editor, this placeholder doesn't work anymore. Usual placeholders like {{ticket.requester.last_name}} are still working.

Maybe this has something to do with the <> marks in the custom field placeholder?

Note: If the macro is still available in a "text-only" version without a rich-content version, the placeholder is still working. But if you create a new macro now you have to use rich-content and you can additionally add a text-only version. But once you are using rich in a macro, the placeholder does not work anymore.